Technology ain't what it used to be in the future; the Coachean Feed achieves ignition

Sometimes I forget that people are actually reading this. The Loquitorians, on hearing my complaints about their latest, re-edited it to the same volume. That was mighty civilized of them, I’d say. Of course, they are not alone in venturing off the edge of the technological cliff. I discovered at Newburgh, while setting up the Round Robin for the Pffffters, that my spreadsheet was too good for the room. There were so many nested statements that only the most recent version of Excel could sort out the formula. Add to this that I was intending to show the thing off when I realized that it was an absolute dud—or more to the point, a program before its time, unless we all run out and update our Microsoft Offices. So I played around yesterday and broke it into two pieces, one for an even number and one for an odd, and that seems to work fine, but I’ll need to test it on my antiquarian Excel at home; my version is so old that it doesn’t understand the concept of zero. Oh, well. Pride goeth before the fall, as they say in Aphorismia.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about and refining what I am now calling the Coachean Feed. My original plan of replacing newspapers quickly proved pointless, not because I don’t still need a replacement for newspapers, but because an RSS feed is not the way to do it. But nevertheless as I continued tracking down sources for the feed, I began to realize that there was an inherent value to the thing itself if the focus could remain clear. It’s that editorial thing. If you pick too many items, or items of too many categories, or items of merely personal appeal, you’re not doing the job. But if all the items are core to LD in some fashion or other, then we’re getting somewhere. So I started limiting the pieces to items of either general LD interest (e.g., feminism, the Supreme Court, philosophy, etc.) or specific topic interest (at the moment, CatNattian education). The result is a more useful and natural intellectual resource. And since this is the stuff I’m normally interested in and therefore reading already, passing it along isn’t particularly onerous, as compared to a general news site. The link is over there on the top right. I’ll keep working on it and refining it—I have a lot of other sources to track down—but I think it’s now on the right track, at least for the last couple of days. From your perspective, adding either a bookmark of the feed page or an RSS of the feed into your own reader is no big deal. Give it a whirl. (Do note that if you go back far enough, it starts getting dicey. As I say, it was a learning process for me.)

Which doesn’t, of course, answer the question raised by the non-reading of newspapers and the generally educated debater. Adventures along that line will continue again shortly.